R. D. Laing Quotes

Quotes about:

• Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

  R. D. Laing

  Depression, Crazy, Insane World

  85 Copy quote

• If you have passion for what you do, the company you keep, the life you live, it will be reflected in whatever you create. Passion is like that; it springs out, jumps, unpredictable and unplanned, into everything we touch. If it doesn't, others know. Passion can't be faked and it can't be manufactured. Which is why it is so priceless.

  R. D. Laing

  Spring, Passion, Company You Keep

  63 Copy quote

• A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Taken, Mad

  "The Politics of Experience". Book by Ronald David Laing, p. 58, 1967.

  65 Copy quote

• The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Learning, Men

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

  55 Copy quote

• Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.

  R. D. Laing

  Reality, Mind, Faults

  49 Copy quote

• We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.

  R. D. Laing

  Love, Sentimental, Realizing

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

  45 Copy quote

• Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.

  R. D. Laing

  Lying, Deceiving, Capacity

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

  36 Copy quote

• True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.

  R. D. Laing

  Reality, Self, Ego

  39 Copy quote

• Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

  R. D. Laing

  Funny, Life, Sexually Transmitted Diseases

  45 Copy quote

• Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.

  R. D. Laing

  Enlightenment, Psychological, Breakthrough

  16 Copy quote

• The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.

  R. D. Laing

  Spiritual, Thinking, Shapes

  Attributed in: "Educating Christians" by Jack Lee Seymour, Margaret Ann Crain, Joseph V. Crockett, (p. 53), 1993.

  18 Copy quote

• Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.

  R. D. Laing

  Pain, Life Is, This Life

  44 Copy quote

• Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.

  R. D. Laing

  Betrayal, Abdication, Normal

  38 Copy quote

• Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.

  R. D. Laing

  Love, Life, Psychology

  39 Copy quote

• Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.

  R. D. Laing

  Insane World, Break Through, Insanity

  'The Politics of Experience' (1967) ch. 6

  41 Copy quote

• We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

  R. D. Laing

  Nature, Class, Society

  R. D. Laing (1990). “The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise”, p.9, Penguin UK

  6 Copy quote

• Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.

  R. D. Laing

  Insanity, Independence, Negative

  32 Copy quote

• The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

  R. D. Laing

  Change, Learning, Knowledge

  Attributed in: "Educating Christians" by Jack Lee Seymour, Margaret Ann Crain, Joseph V. Crockett, (p. 53), 1993.

  26 Copy quote

• What we call "normal" is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive actions on experience...It is radically estranged from the structure of being.

  R. D. Laing

  Depression, Denial, Normal

  24 Copy quote

• The way out is through the door you came in.

  R. D. Laing

  Healing, Doors, Perspective

  23 Copy quote

• We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

  R. D. Laing

  Civilization, Driven, Destruction

  31 Copy quote

• The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.

  R. D. Laing

  Patient, Traveler, Psychiatry

  18 Copy quote

• In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.

  R. D. Laing

  Our Society, Lost, Ritual

  16 Copy quote

• No one has the answer: we are answer and question.

  R. D. Laing

  Answers

  19 Copy quote

• When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Parent, Relation

  R. D. Laing (1990). “The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise”, p.61, Penguin UK

  21 Copy quote

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